Friday, March 29, 2013

Sajid Khan suffers from a severe
bout of BAPS - Bozo At the Party Syndrome - where the only one entertained by the
guy mimicking animal noises is the guy mimicking animal noises. Sajid thinks
the way to make a movie about half-wits and overbearing heroes descending into
kitsch is for the movie itself to be half-witted, overbearing and kitschy. He
presents the movie as a Sajid Khan Entertainer, completely oblivious to the
fact that the end product is the entertainment equivalent of being poked in the
ribs with a screwdriver for two and a half hours. Himmatwala is a lurid display of humor and a wasteful example of 100
crore flogging ‘masala filmmaking’ incompetence. After Houseful 1 and 2 this is
yet another one of those films that left me with the perennial question - 'Why
would anyone pay for this garbage?'

We begin the film not knowing
what brought Sajid and Ajay Devgn together for a remake of a dreadful 80’s
Bollywood film. We end after 150 minutes precisely the same way. Gracelessly
executed, Himmatwala mangles colorful
montages, satire, homage, ludicrous fantasy sequences, OTT song and dance but
drags on endlessly and feels like it was soaked in dirty water. The 80’s
throwback was done very well in The Dirty
Picture and fairly well in OSO, here
the throwback is a cocktail of freakish fashion show and mind numbing melodrama
that actually makes you run to a Sherawali temple and scream ‘Bas maa bas, aur
kitna imtihaan legi tu!’ The clumsily sketched homages of stereotypical village
gundas and his henchmen are as boring and insignificant as the very film Himmatwala spoofs. Rule Number 1 - If
you use gallows humor in an 80’s set Hindi film about rural baddies and heroes,
make sure you have a feel for it first.

It takes some talent to make a
collage of larger than life characters seem smaller than life, but Sajid Khan
pulls it off. With the garish plot and wealth of movie knowledge Sajid has (he
is genuinely, incredibly knowledgeable about cinema), Himmatwala could have been a fun nostalgia 80’s trip, or even an epic
cinematic event. Instead, we get:

1) A skit of Psycho where Devgn attacks Mahesh Manjrekar in the shower with the
line ‘Naha tu raha tha, dhoya maine’.

2) Paresh Rawal cuddling up with
Manjrekar on a khatiya in a horse shed, kissing his ear and licking his lips,
and cupping his hands on his crotch.

3) Majrekar putting a crab in
Rawal’s dhoti, as the latter starts dancing to the tune of Rail Gaadi.

4) ‘Masala’, defined by five goons
threatening to cut Devgn into pieces in five different languages, and Devgn’s retort
in those very languages, topped off with ‘Ata maajhi satakli’.

These ‘comedic’ scenes are
remarkably awful and only some other planet, maybe the one occupied by apes
will hail them as a work of a genius. Scene after scene Sajid pitches the narrative
at a level of blaring loud cacophony, while the editor Nitin Rokade seems
desperate to sprint through Sajid and Farhad’s rotten script as quickly as
possible to get on with his life.

Trapped in the abysmal mess with
varying degrees of collusion are a number of fine actors – Paresh Rawal, Mahesh
Manjrekar, and Zarina Wahab, hamming to the hilt, so happy with their paychecks
one expects them to suddenly break into Gangnam Style. There is also Adhyayan
Suman who effortlessly proves that it is better to remain in career limbo than
make a big screen comeback attempt in a film like Himmatwala. It all hinges on Devgn’s star power but his cringe-inducing,
overdramatic performance is about as embarrassing as it gets. His intermittently
glowering and cartoonish turn is simply painful to watch, there's nothing
really amusing or endearing about it. That leaves the venerable Asrani as a
ticket collector who attempts to avoid looking apologetic for this drivel. The
only person who really seems to be trying here is Tamanna, who at least
understands that playing characters like these requires a little bit of clothing and a whole lot of passion. All her jhatkas and matkas are choreographed to
perfection and cinematographer Manoj Soni lights her perpetually smug
expression very elegantly. The real star is a tiger who is so terribly
superimposed on the screen it makes the original Jeetendra film look like a $200
million technical masterpiece.

Himmatwala is borderline treasonous and a disgrace to the comedy
genre. The funniest thing about it is how its title actually refers to its
audience, and how the song ‘Maar de bum pe laath’ is a euphemism for Sajid
inviting critics to review his film.

Thursday, March 28, 2013

In the second act of GI
Joe Retaliation there is a nine minute sequence without a single line of
dialogue, where a Ninja has a machine gun swordfight with another Ninja and then
scales a nearby mountain while simultaneously fighting multiple Ninjas leaping
and swinging across the snowy peaks. It’s epic. It’s everything one wants to see
in a GI Joe movie. It genuinely feels like the director has brought your
childhood action figure battle between good guys and baddies to life on the big
screen. But when this scene ends, so does everyone’s effort into making the
movie.

GI Joe Retaliation
tries to be a sequel and a reboot at the same time by desperately trying to
extinguish our memories of the terrible first film. When The Rock was cast in
the recent Fast and Furious movie, the
move somehow breathed new life into the waning franchise. The same tactic is
employed here, but sadly it fails and fails hard. Placing Jon Chu, the guy who
made Step Up 2 The Streets and Justin Bieber Never Say Never in the
director’s chair to correct the mistakes of the first GI Joe is a baffling move
to begin with, but to cancel its release just days before it opens in theaters,
and then delaying it by a year for post conversion to horrible 3D exhibits the delusional
arrogance that thrives in major Hollywood studios. There was only one memorable
part in the first film, where the Joes put on exoskeleton suits and engage in ridiculous
stunts for an insane chase scene that culminates with the Eiffel Tower being
destroyed. The sequel neither has any fun chase scenes, nor any snazzy gadgets
that make the GI Joes look cool, all we get to see is a bunch of firearms in
Bruce Willis’ kitchen.

The story picks up immediately after the events of Rise of the Cobra and the plot could very
well have been written by a seven year old with his crayons. Cobra escapes
imprisonment with the help of Storm Shadow, and the entire GI Joe unit is
destroyed save for the trio of Roadblock (The Rock), Flint (Cotrona) and Jaye (Palicki).
As Cobra attempts his master plan to take over the world, Snake Eyes teams up
with Jinx to kidnap Shadow to extract information on his boss’ plans and help
the Joes stop global annihilation. The lack of a decent story is generally
compensated with great action scenes, but apart from the CGI mountain sequence there
is literally nothing in GI Joe Retaliation
to keep you entertained. One can’t look for logic or plausibility in a GI Joe
movie but nano robots being used to impersonate the President of the United
States who destroys every nuclear missile in the world with one button at a UN
meeting is pushing it. Actually the movie could have been blazing fun had it all been knowingly, ludicrously over the
top but it keeps offering grating back stories and daddy issues and over
seriousness that seems frustratingly out of place in a story like this.

The 3D that allegedly took over a year to build makes GI Joe Retaliation look like a plastic dollhouse
with flat cardboard cutouts as characters. The badass guitar crunching tone of Seven
Nation Army that you saw in the trailer is misleading because the film is a
misguided, tiresome mess that puts the bad in badass and the ass in badass. It’s
the only movie ever produced that makes non-stop explosions and hand to hand
combat seem really boring. Unless your sole intention is to see Adrianne
Palicki in skimpy clothes in 3D, you’re better off spending your money on something
more action packed, like a Nagraj comic for instance.

Friday, March 22, 2013

Imagine an unintentionally funny
90’s era Die Hard video game, where
John McLaine is the head of security for the President of the United States of
America and also the last man in the White House to stand against a terrorist
threat and hostage situation. Olympus Has
fallen is exactly that movie, flaunting its badge of stupidity like the
Medal of Honor, starring Gerard Butler as a beefier, more athletic, Kung Fu Karate McLaine.

Directed by Antoine Fuqua, who
made Training Day years ago, Olympus Has Fallen is a large serving of
guilty pleasure for action fans looking for brainless escapist fun. The plot is
a bit similar to Red Dawn and the
recent news of the handsome Kim Jong Un threatening to vanquish the US and take
over South Korea seems like an elaborate marketing campaign for this film. Fuqua
presents a very ‘realistic’ portrayal of how the White House, one of the most
secure locations in America could easily be taken over by Dr. Evil from Austin Powers and be used as a hub to
control the entire world. Here we have villainous North Koreans who somehow steal
an AC-130 gunship, a plane the size of a football field from the US army, then walk
surreptitiously into the White House with guns, then kidnap the President and
gain access to every single nuclear weapon in the country. A badass bit of maneuvering,
though not successful thanks to the one and only Mike Banning (Butler) who
loves his country as much as his gun, and cares more for his President than for
his wife.

As the terror threat rages on, bodies
fly everywhere, and the villains torture the POTUS to extract information, Banning
sweeps quietly through the White House walls, punching North Koreans to death
and picking up their weapons like in an FPS game. The President is played by
Aaron Eckhart who exudes a ridiculous amount of sincerity and commitment in a
role set in a boiling lava of cheese and schlocky clichés. He even gets to do
some boxing with his head of security and when clipped on the face asks his
sparring partner not to hit the President.

Director Fuqua throws in more offensive,
ludicrous B-movie material than you can imagine – from nuclear launch codes to
loud blaring patriotic music to unexplained double crossing. In one scene our
hero is seen punching in keys to abort a catastrophic nuclear meltdown while
experts from the Crisis Room recite the codes, and when he asks what ‘hashtag’
is, the secretary of the state triumphantly decodes it for him by shouting ‘SHIFT
3’. Later, a woman who is beaten, kicked, slapped and tied up asks the
President how her hair looks. After a point even the filmmakers give up and
proceed to directly rip off Die Hard –
in one of the funniest scene of the film a double agent who is in cahoots with
the enemy instead of killing Banning, shares a cigarette with him like Hans
Gruber, and then gets his ass handed to him after exposing himself.

Friday, March 15, 2013

There will be Blood, Magnolia, Boogie Nights,
Punch Drunk Love. Those familiar with Paul Thomas Anderson’s films don’t
need to read any review to watch The
Master. Those unfamiliar with his films have never been exposed to cinema
of a higher order. He is the Orson Welles of the modern era, and he
demonstrates the same with exceptional passion in his latest. A story dealing with a Scientologist may seem like an odd choice
for Anderson but he pulls it off and presents to us his most sublime and most underrated
film.

The Master is an impeccably crafted, surreal fever dream, a story told
through a lens that gives the most mundane a heightened sense of realism and
the real world a strange hallucinatory effect. Anderson explores the themes he
so often plays with – loneliness among a crowd and the need to be reclusive
when everyone needs you. Like in his previous films he doles out frames of technical brilliance and considerable beauty, with the
trademark deliberate slow pacing that continually make his characters and their
creator all the more fascinating.

But this is not just a surreal film for the sake of being a trippy
movie. Anderson has never been so simple to make a film which is ONLY a love
story, or ONLY an ensemble drama, The
Master has a lot of depth and a hidden meaning. Joaquin Phoenix stars as Freddie, a
mentally unbalanced man, a drifter and societal menace, losing himself in
alcohol after a stint in the Navy during WWII, becoming more and more agitated each
day. Things take a turn when he sneaks into a ship to steal some alcohol and
meets the charismatic, mysterious Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), an intellectual
man leading a semi-religious cult called The Cause that indulges in mental
auditing to ‘heal’ damaged people. Lancaster takes pity on Freddie and becomes
attached to him, determined to purge him of his troubles. Freddie is awestruck
by the Master’s organization and techniques built on the his beliefs of past
lives and rigorous mental testing, but confronting his own past during the ‘healing’
sessions becomes a struggle as the Master’s erratic behavior is complimented by
the increasingly bizarre foundations of The Cause.

Phoenix
and Hoffman are absolutely electrifying in their roles with method performances
taken to extreme levels. Phoenix’s scowl showing utter disdain towards society is
unsettling to say the least, as is Hoffman’s take on Scientology founder Ron
Hubbard. Anderson doesn’t outright demonize Scientology but it is easy to spot
the parallels – the recording audit sessions, the financial frauds, the
unintentionally hilarious ego of the Master, the delusions of him and his
followers. It’s creepy and fascinating to explore the fact that humans when
pushed to the extreme rely on any kind of delusion to survive the real world. The other standout performance comes from Amy Adams as Lancaster’s
supportive wife, she is excellent at looking naïve and melancholy in one scene
and batshit crazy in the next.

Anderson is always intriguing because his films are never really
easy to fully ingest the first time around. Even Punch Drunk Love has a deeper subtext to the romantic text, that it’s
a film about isolation and entrapment in an unjust society. The Master seems to be about two men trying to become the ruler of
their own worlds, but ultimately failing. Both Freddie and Lancaster constantly
strive for prominence, but can never escape their own speciousness. Both men
are opportunists who feel that taking risks will ultimately get them some pride
in the festering bunghole that is the human race. Neither of them have any real
dignity, honor, or even scruples (Lancaster embezzles govt funds while Freddie
uses women), and eventually when they undergo a great deal of suffering they
try to be good people but fail miserably, despite not having any fault of their
own.

The cinematography of The
Master is dreamy to a fault, but so visually breathtaking that its
excesses guarantee drool. This is Anderson’s most visually exquisite
film and he has lavished on his project a kind of attention to emotional detail
that will remain unmatched in the years to come. In an effort to recreate the
look of the post WWII era, Anderson and his DOP Mihai Malaimare shot the film on
65mm which yields significantly greater image area and more depth, clarity and
emotional impact on the screen. Most of the film is naturally lit but it is
hard to overstate how gorgeous it looks:

Music, as always with Anderson, is integral to the film and here Jonny
Greenwood, the lead guitarist of Radiohead composes some otherworldly stuff
that is extremely well used with the unreal visuals. There is so much squeezed
in the two hour twenty minutes runtime that you'd think it could be either too
much or too little, but Anderson finds a fine balance and allows the characters
and story to unwind perfectly.

One doesn’t expect exquisite
family entertainment from a film called Texas
Chainsaw 3D but those who’ve seen the original 1974 movie do hope for some good
old slasher thrills. Unfortunately John Lussenhop’s reboot slash quasi sequel
cannibalizes the franchise in the clumsiest possible manner. And when
Leatherface is made an unlikely ‘hero’ in a groan inducing bit of character
dynamics, you want to reach out for a chainsaw and run towards the producers.

Texas Chainsaw 3D arrives on the heels of Michael Bay’s 2003 reboot
and 2006’s prequel to the reboot and the new film overlooks both those movies
and in turns becomes a sequel to the original while also trying to be a reboot.
It’s not hard to smell the whiff of the studio’s desperation to milk a
franchise with no regard for creativity. The story picks up where Tobe Hooper’s
original left off – the people of a small Texan town unearth the grisly murders
that Leatherface’s Sawyer family had committed and in retaliation burn their
house down. A few decades later a young woman travels to the very town to
inherit some property, unbeknownst to the fact that a gruesome secret from her
past would spring up and decimate her and her friends.

The film was not screened for
critics and it is quite obvious why. The plotting is painfully clichéd, with
the obvious set of hackneyed teenagers on a road trip stumbling across a mass
murderer – this seemed new and exciting back in 1974 when the first movie came
out but it is atrocious to think that a filmmaker relies on the same old shtick
in this day and age and expect a big box office hit. Even Wes Craven, the guy
behind the legendary Nightmare on Elm
Street movies spoofed the genre with the Scream series decades on, and even those seem dated now. Adding in
more gore and playing louder musical cues don’t make a stale genre and decaying
storytelling means the least bit exciting. That the 3D is unpleasant is an
understatement, that it is not scary is frustrating – in one scene Leatherface
runs after a victim through a crowd at a carnival. What’s worse is that the
film neither caters to the fans of the franchise nor to newbies. The only apparent
consolation in this mess is that four of the cast members from the first two
films make an appearance here, but the real succor is its very short runtime.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Frank Baum’s The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a timeless classic, and since the 1939 film
version there has been a hand drawn animated sequel, another Disney sequel and
even a Michael Jackson musical spinoff. 74 years on, Sam Raimi’s prequel
to The Wizard of Oz is a whimsical,
funny and mildly scary ride for kids, and that’s about it. One expects huge
entertainment from the guy who made the Evil
Dead and the Spiderman films, but
Oz the Great and Powerful is the all
too familiar mixture of visual wonder and storytelling disappointment.

Like
in the 1939 film, Oz the Great and
Powerful opens in black and white 4:3 format and slowly changes to
widescreen in color when the wizard arrives in Oz – it’s a great moment because
the Alice in Wonderland style artwork
leaves you as awestruck as the protagonist staring at the imagery. It’s
difficult to not draw parallels to Tim Burton’s movie because the colors and aesthetics
make you feel like this story takes place on the other side of Wonderland. Sam Raimi
opens with Kansas in 1905 when a circus magician
Oscar (James Franco) gets stuck in a tornado and arrives in Oz, where he is
treated as a prophesy fulfilling powerful wizard by three witches (Michelle
Williams, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz) who all seem to seek the throne of Emerald
City. One of them is secretly the ‘bad witch’, and anyone who has seen the
original film won’t take long to decipher her identity.

As Oz finds out the real prophesy, he meets a
host of characters who join his quest including the monkey bellhop Flynn (Zach
Braff) and a little girl made of China (Joey King). The problem is that these
characters serve absolutely no purpose in the film. The cowardly lion, the
scarecrow and the Tinman were all significant characters in the original film as
they actually added to the story, here the only thing the supporting characters
add are terrible lines and unconvincing CGI. The ‘bad witch’ makes a great
entry with her claw when her face isn’t visible, but when she does show up, she
is not only not scary but also looks like a green colored Sonakshi Sinha. It
doesn’t help that our hero James Franco is crushingly miscast, veering from haughtiness
to befuddlement every other scene. 127
Hours showed us that he is a great actor but even his namesake duck from Ted exuded more nuance and histrionic skill
than him here. Weisz and Kunis are pointedly whimsical and hammy, aiming for
the younger audience with their forced laughs and Williams is simply a stoner
version of her role in My week with Marylyn.
You could call them all classic Disney villainesses and witches, but there’s
no getting around the unintentional hilarity the gratingly simplistic
characterizations.

The biggest misfire of the film is the 3D which
actually is fun in the opening credits but gets more and more wearisome as the
film progresses. Despite the many ‘showy’ sequences it is clear that Raimi is
no Scorsese and Oz is no Hugo. The wonderful glowing artwork here
is dimmed and scrubbed with smut by the 3D glasses. How the studios behind
films like this one and last week’s Jack
the Giant Slayer don’t realize that the 3rd dimension don’t
really help the box office remains a mystery.

Friday, March 1, 2013

Hollywood needs to stop handing
out budgets of $200 million to people like it is pocket money, because it is
not, and 99 percent of these humongous budget movies fail to do what is
expected of them – entertain. It is harder to please audiences nowadays, but in
this day and age, no one wants to pay a premium to watch a terribly scripted tech
demo of colossal visual effects.

Jack The Giant Slayer is a mess from start to finish. The romance
is painfully clichéd, the adventure is dull and the only thing Giant in the
film is its budget. As the film goes on it becomes increasingly shocking to
assimilate the fact that the writer-director team of Christopher McQuarrie and
Bryan Singer who made The Usual Suspects have
been responsible for the muddle on screen. Singer seems like a two hit wonder
thanks to the horrid Superman Returns and
the even worse Valkyrie that preceded
this film and it is not hard to figure out why he has decided to direct the
next X-Men installment next. In Jack the Giant Slayer Singer comes
dangerously close to demonstrating that the genius behind Keyser Soze’s story
was a fluke. Not only does he fail to create a fresh or likable bunch of
central characters but he also fails to create a sense of adventure despite the
$200 million CGI entrusted to him.

The film tries to be a radical adult
version of the ‘Jack and the beanstalk’, here we have a young man (a miscast Nicholas
Hoult) as a farm boy who falls for the princess (Eleanor Tomlinson) and
inadvertently chances upon a bunch of fabled magic beans. Upon contact with
water the beans sprout into a giant tree that connects the kingdom to the land
of the villainous giants. One thing leads to another and Jack sets off with the
king’s elite guard to rescue the princess – a plot that seemed stale even when
Super Mario Bros came out. Like Snow
White and the Huntsman last year, the film falsely promises to offer a
twisted and unique take on a beloved children’s property. What it does offer is
a dreadfully written villain (played by Stanley Tucci) whose backstory and intentions
were either left on the cutting room floor or were never scripted to begin
with.

The giants are incredibly
detailed, each one of them has a distinct character – Fee, Fi, Fo and Fum are given
some serious screentime and even some character dynamics which is a nice touch.
The giants are also quite disgusting, some dig their noses and then taste their
fingers – something kids will enjoy giggling over. The humans are quite
terribly sketched though, each given worse dialogue and motives than the next. Seeing
as the film fails completely in story and character, one expects to at least
see a decent CGI demo. The special effects are great and expensive looking no
doubt, but not something you have never seen in cinema before. The characters
stare at the imagery as if there is something epic going on but you never once
share their sentiment, and the 3D feels as tacked on as ever. The action and big finale are downright boring and everyone
involved in the film seems constantly confused about its target audience. Hopefully
Singer’s X-Men reunion won’t
disappoint as well.